NEA has a full library of leftist teacher prep courses
Not satisfied with simply bankrolling Democratic candidates, the National Education Association now offers a compendium of teacher prep materials for educators. The catch? It’s a functional checklist of some of the worst ideas in education.
Their “micro-credential library” includes entire modules dedicated not to the science of reading or student discipline, but to gay and transgender inclusivity, restorative justice, trauma-informed pedagogy, and diversity, equity, and culture competence.
They are capitalizing on a growing policy trend: More than half of states now allow teachers to leverage micro-credentials — digital certifications earned through short online courses on specific topics — to both earn and maintain licensure.
There is much to recommend this approach: It’s affordable, self-paced, and narrowly focused on specific job skills. As such, these experiments and alternative pathways for teacher development are worth exploring.
But there are also drawbacks. With no centralized body overseeing micro-credentials, their value depends on the repute of the organization issuing them. The NEA is one institution that school personnel largely trust, yet their micro-credential library would be best avoided for teachers hoping to improve their instruction.
In addition to the aforementioned modules, the library also includes micro-credentials in topics such as “Adult Social Emotional Learning” and “Climate Change and Environmental Justice.” Will invigorating explorations on the nuts-and-bolts of self-care and climate injustice reverse the course of the nation’s plummeting reading scores? Probably not.
The NEA’s micro-credential stack on “Supporting LGBTQ+ Students” includes an entire module to help educators understand “the intersections of race, gender, and sexual orientation.” In this 15 hour course, teachers explore terms such “race privilege” — defined as “white-dominated, white-identified, and white-centered” — and resources such as “Privilege 101: A Quick and Dirty Guide” and “The Future of Trans,” a documentary.
Teachers learn “how to advocate for LGBTQ policies for students and co-workers,” including “trans-inclusive” policies that allow men to use women’s restrooms. And the reflections ask teachers to review their curricula for opportunities to include pride books into children’s classrooms. Teacher-as-activist is key to the approach.
The NEA also offers a series of micro-credentials in “Restorative Practices,” which mention the adverse impacts of zero-tolerance discipline policies and cast restorative justice as the salve for misbehavior. Never mind the paucity of evidence for restorative justice, let alone the substantial evidence that soft-on-consequences approaches to discipline leave schools more chaotic and send academic scores into a nosedive.
The “Trauma-Informed Pedagogy” micro-credential series includes entire sections on race-based trauma. Teachers are instructed to explore how institutional racism and microaggressions — not combat or near-death experiences — inflict emotional trauma. According to the module, the mental and emotional “injury” caused by structural, institutional, and internalized racism can manifest in the form of bedwetting, thumb-sucking, and the “fear of something bad happening.”
This credential also acknowledges how racism can harm white students, noting that “Beliefs and feelings of immunity or superiority can lead white students to have an over-inflated sense of self, a skewed view of all people in our society, and a lack of empathy.” That teachers should identify their young, white students as having “internalized privilege” and a natural lack of empathy while all children of color are oppressed and traumatized beyond repair is at once profoundly insulting and likely to foster precisely the discriminatory mindset the program claims to oppose.
There are also lessons on “healing-centered self-care” for teachers to combat “compassion fatigue.” The entire library is riddled with this phraseology: brave environment, restorative circles, and climate-change-induced trauma, to name a few examples.
The progressive nostrums and neologisms are aplenty; practical advice for teachers is scarce.
As an established organization, the NEA’s micro-credentials likely carry currency in many school districts and state-agencies that recognize them for various purposes related to educator licensing. Fifteen states allow educators to complete micro-credentials as a part of fulfilling state license renewal requirements. Ten states encourage the use of micro-credentials for obtaining a first-time professional education credential. Several others integrate micro-credentials into educator preparation in some way. Some states and school districts offer salary advancements for completing micro-credentials.
Given their popularity, it is imperative that we scrutinize these programs. Without careful quality control, educators will be taking lessons in climate justice and white privilege to re-up licenses, earn course credit, or even receive pay bumps.
We mustn’t let a good idea for flexible, career-specific resources be hijacked by what AEI’s Rick Hess has aptly deemed “critical theory argle-bargle.” Otherwise, educator micro-credentialing might find itself in the graveyard of the many well-intentioned education reforms that fell off the tracks during implementation and landed in a steaming heap of leftist nonsense.
Daniel Buck is a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the director of the Conservative Education Reform Network, where Anna Low is the program manager.